Tuesday, May 1, 2018

A not-terribly-short history of the Lodges and the Kennedys


I’ve read my fair share (and other people’s fair shares, as well) of John Grisham novels. When I was in middle school/high school I wanted to be a writer…of some sort. Novels, sports, non-fiction. I have 500 pages of notes on a book about Andrew Jackson’s 1833 tour of New England that at some point I’ll get around to writing. But one novel I read that stood out to me was The Pelican Brief. It was a book about a young legal assistant who wrote a theory about who was behind the assassination of two Supreme Court justices and ended up being right and getting targeted by killers. Denzel came to help her. The book is way better than the movie, as most John Grisham novels and most books, to be honest, are.

What follows is a simple theory based on some reading I did for my AP US History class on JFK’s assassination and the Conspiracy Day we had last week in which my students were presented with six different theories as to who killed JFK. They had to evaluate the evidence presented for what supported the theory, and what undermined it. It was great fun. There was one theory that was not presented in the evidence, which I would like to present now. Again (are you listening, CIA?) this is simply a thought exercise and please don’t kill me.
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We need to start in 1919.

When Democratic president Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, the Pause button between The War To End All Wars and World War II, he did not take anyone with him. This was a slap in the face to his own party and to the Republican Party, who expected a bone to be thrown their way in a matter of such worldwide importance.

Chief among those upset was Henry Cabot Lodge, the heir to a shipping fortune, descendant of two Boston institutions: the Cabots and the Lodges.

Wait. When I say “institutions,” we need to back up. Way up. There’s context, I promise.

The Cabots were a Massachusetts institution and, as such, were an American institution. Joseph Cabot was born in Salem in 1720 and ran opium, rum, and slaves, becoming exceedingly wealthy through shipping, as most prominent Massachusetts families did. His son, George (born in 1752), attended Harvard for two years before dropping out to go to sea. George was the captain of his own ship by age 21. The Cabots soon became synonymous with American politics. George, the Harvard dropout, was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 at Age 23. Two years later he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In 1787 he was a delegate to the state convention that ratified the Constitution. He was a senator from Massachusetts from 1791 to 1796, supported Alexander Hamilton and became a director of Hamilton’s 1st Bank of the United States.

In a rare political misstep, Cabot – an opponent of the Democratic-Republican Jefferson and Madison administrations – was the president of the Hartford Convention, an 1814 meeting of Federalists that didn’t like how the War of 1812 was going and openly discussed reforming the Constitution but stopped just short of suggesting that New England secede from the Union. During the convention Andrew Jackson led a group of rednecks, slaves, and Native Americans into a stunning upset of Great Britain at New Orleans. England pursued peace and the Hartford Convention looked like a bunch of traitors. It essentially ended the Federalist Party.

The Lodges were a Boston Brahmin family, a first family of Boston: Harvard-educated with a Beacon Hill address. According to Boston Brahmin code, you should only be mentioned in the newspaper when you’re born, married, and dead. To qualify as a First Family, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, you needed “four or more generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the Provinces, a Governor or so, one of two Doctors of Divinity, or a member of Congress not later than the time of long boots with tassels.” Both the Cabots and the Lodges fit the criteria.

At a 1910 alumni dinner at Holy Cross, a toast was given:

Here’s to dear old Boston/
The home of the bean and the cod/
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots/
And Cabots speak only to God

Here comes Henry Cabot Lodge, the son of John Ellerton Lodge and Anna Cabot and 1871 graduate of Harvard – the same year he married Anna Cabot Mills Davis, 14 years his junior and a union of two of Boston’s most illustrious families. He earned Harvard’s first Ph.D. degree in political science in 1876, edited the North American Review with Henry Adams, and joined the faculty at Harvard. Lodge served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1880-1881 and the United States House of Representatives from 1887-1893. In 1893 Lodge won the election to become one of Massachusetts’ senators, a position he would hold until his death in 1924.

As WGBH described him, Lodge was a hardcore Republican who supported “the gold standard, high protective tariffs, an aggressive approach to global politics, and a Navy large enough to back it up.”
Lodge didn’t like immigrants, especially the Irish. The Immigration Restriction League was founded by Brahmins in 1894 at the height of the Nativism trend in the United States. Lodge sponsored a bill in Congress that would require immigrants to pass a literacy test before gaining entry to the United States. Lodge showed his hand when (bear with me) thanks to a storm that bought the colonists enough time to reinforce their positions, the British voluntarily evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776. Of course this is the day St. Patrick died and many Bostonians didn’t see this as a coincidence. Lodge – not exactly anxious to honor an Irishman – helped rebrand March 17 as Evacuation Day.

Theodore Roosevelt’s best friend and chief political adviser was Henry Cabot Lodge. They had met Harvard’s Porcellian Club – the oldest, founded in 1791, and most prestigious “final club.” That the Porcellian Club refused admission to Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused FDR to later declare the rejection as “the greatest disappointment” of his life. A former member said of the Porcellian Club, “If you don’t make your first million by 30, they give it to you.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – the Facebook twins – were members. Lodge, who had won a Massachusetts Senate seat in 1891, worked to get Teddy Roosevelt a job in the government after William McKinley won the election of 1896. Lodge got Teddy a post as assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. They were both imperialists, agitating for intervention in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American War.

Henry Cabot Lodge was appointed an overseer of Harvard University from 1911 until his death in 1924. His son-in-law Augustus Peabody Gardner was the nephew of Jack Gardner II and Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the world-renowned museum that bears her name.

Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election, mainly thanks to Lodge’s BFF Roosevelt running as a (very successful) third-party candidate, representing the Bull Moose party – a reference to an “incident” in Milwaukee when John Flammang Schrank shot Roosevelt in the chest before a campaign speech. Roosevelt explained that he had just been shot, begged his supporters’ pardon, pulled the bloody manuscript of his speech out of his pocket, said “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” gave an hour-long speech and then went to the hospital. Roosevelt split the Republican vote with incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson dominated the 1912 electoral vote 435 to 88, but was actually outgained in the popular vote by Roosevelt and Taft.

In 1916 Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan “He kept us out of war,” maintaining U.S. isolationism in the early stages of World War I. That same election season saw a major threat to the Lodge dynasty. John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald made a serious legitimate run at Lodge’s seat.
Honey Fitz was born to poor Irish immigrants in the North End of Boston in 1863, the middle of the Civil War. But he rose to attend Harvard Medical School for a year until his father died in 1885. Honey Fitz worked his way to the House of Representatives in 1894 and sponsored legislation that funded the T and the Cape Cod Canal, and also tried to overcome the predominant anti-immigrant stance. He convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto an anti-immigration bill introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge. Honey Fitz threw out the inaugural first pitch at the new Fenway Park. According to Gerard O’Neill’s “Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics was King in Irish Boston,” 


Lodge (to Honey Fitz): You are an impudent young man. Do you think the Jews and Italians have any right in this country?

Honey Fitz (to Lodge): As much as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.

Honey Fitz – it’s just such a wonderful nickname – took on Henry Cabot Lodge’s Senate seat in 1916. Honey Fitz won just one county: Suffolk County, whose seat is Boston. Lodge won the popular vote by about 33,000 votes, 51-45.

John F. Fitzgerald married his second cousin Mary Josephine Hannon. Their oldest child, Rose, would marry Joseph P. Kennedy. Honey Fitz was upset that their firstborn son, Joe Kennedy, Jr., wasn’t named after him. Yet, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Honey Fitz told the press that his grandson would become the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States. Fitzgerald won a tight 1918 election for the House of Representatives but an investigation uncovered voter fraud – a Kennedy tradition – by Honey Fitz’s allies and overturned the election.

Wilson’s isolationism didn’t last. Wilson asked for, and received, a congressional declaration of war in 1917. In 1918 he went before Congress and gave the famous Fourteen Points speech, the last of which would establish “a general association of nations…affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The League of Nations was proposed, and it won Wilson the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Arguably already famous, Lodge is taught in US History/AP US History courses as the guy who defeated the League of Nations. Lodge – a war hawk – wanted Germany crushed by the Treaty of Versailles (as did France and Great Britain). There were three camps who reacted to the Treaty of Versailles: those who were all in favor, those who were 100% opposed, known as the Irreconcilables; and then there were the Reservationists, led by Lodge, who were opposed unless certain reservations they had were addressed. Lodge felt like the U.S. would give up too much power under the League of Nations, so Lodge wrote fourteen reservations to match Wilson’s fourteen points.

While Wilson was campaigning across the country to win approval for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, he had a severe stroke. It paralyzed his left side and “caused significant brain damage.” He refused to resign and it “likely contributed to Wilson’s uncharacteristic failure to reach a compromise” with the Reservationists and Irreconcilables.

Peace treaties have to be approved by the Senate with a two-thirds majority. In 1919 this meant 56 of 84 senators had to be in favor. Lodge was not only the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was the Senate Majority Leader. Wilson needed Lodge. The first version of the Treaty upon which the Senate voted included the 14 Lodge reservations. Wilson ordered his supporters to vote against it. Of course the Irreconcilables voted against it, too, and it failed by one vote. A second vote without Lodge’s reservations fell short by three votes because the “Cabot Republicans” and the Irreconcilables voted against it. A third version was voted upon in 1920 and included some of the Lodge Reservations. It, too, failed. That was it.

The Treaty of Versailles was not ratified by the United States and it took the Knox-Porter Resolution in 1921 to formally end World War I. Mississippi Representative Ross Collins said that “with the exception of the United States of America, all the nations that were at war with the Central Powers are now at peace with them. This country alone remains in a state of war…the people in all parts of our Nation are hungry for actual peace.”

Wilson died in Washington, D.C. in February 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge died of a stroke – the same culprit that got Wilson –  in Cambridge, Massachusetts nine months later.

Which brings us, finally, to the subject of the theory. Ten and a half months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Henry Cabot Lodge II was born to George Cabot – Henry Cabot Lodge’s son – and Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen (granddaughter of Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen).

Where Henry Cabot Lodge was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard, Lodge II – or “Cabot” or “Cab,” to distinguish himself from his titan grandfather - was a member of the Hasty Pudding and the Fox Club. Cab’s father George died of heart failure at 35 years old, when Cab was seven years old. George also served in the Spanish-American War and was also close to Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote a nice little introduction to George’s posthumous collection Poems and Dramas of George Cabot Lodge, published in 1911. That year Henry Adams – who worked with Henry Cabot Lodge on the North American Reviewpublished George’s biography. Cab’s grandfather, The Henry Cabot Lodge, raised him and oversaw Cab’s education. Cab graduated in just three years Cum Laude from Harvard in 1924.

Having written for the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald Tribune for the previous seven years, Cab published “The Cult of Weakness” in 1932, a collection of essays that echoed the tenets of Social Darwinism and called for “a return of government principles which will recognize the rights and welfare of the strong against the weak.” He was opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and, despite this, won Massachusetts’ Senate seat over the extremely popular Democratic governor James M. Curley. He was the only Republican in the United States to steal a Democratic seat in 1936. The new junior senator was escorted down the aisle to take the oath of office by the senior senator, David I. Walsh, “the most successful Irish Catholic politician” in Massachusetts, who hated Curley. Cab was the seventh Lodge to serve in the Senate.

Re-elected in 1942, Cab became the first senator to resign his seat in order to go on active duty in the military since the Civil War after Eisenhower told Congress to choose between Congress and the war. He served in the Mediterranean and Europe, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Colonel before regaining his Senate seat over Walsh, whose “appeal had been diminished” when he was named as the senator who had frequented a male brothel in New York City which also happened to be a meeting-spot for German spies.” Cab won the election to become the junior senator from Massachusetts, since he had resigned his seat during World War II.

That was cool and all, but Cab gained national attention for the first time when he helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for the Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower would be tough on communism, having been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and having overseen the D-Day invasion. Eisenhower muscled out Robert A. Taft, eldest son of William Howard Taft (former rival of family friend Teddy Roosevelt), for the Republican nomination. Cab neglected his own re-election campaign to focus on Eisenhower’s presidential bid.

His opponent in the 1952 Massachusetts Senate race? John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, “loaned” the Boston Post, a prominent Republican-leaning newspaper, $500,000 during the campaign. The newspaper endorsed JFK though publisher John Fox said the endorsement came before the loan. “[Fitzgerald] was very much concerned about young John being a candidate for public office,” said John F. Cahill, chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, in a 1967 interview.
Lodge was Massachusetts through and through, a personality that was described as cold and aloof. Lodge’s campaign aide in 1952, James Sullivan, said of Lodge, “He had a gracious manner, a certain remoteness…He wouldn’t put his arm around you and say, ‘Let’s go out for a beer,’ or something like that. No way.” Kennedy, however, “had that marvelous quality of making you feel that you were his special friend.”

Fletcher Knebel observed, “The Kennedys might be of Boston society; The Lodges were Boston society.”

There was at least one instance in which the campaign got personal, and it revolved around future Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill. The way O’Neill told it in his book (and excerpted in the Chicago Tribune), the Kennedys had asked O’Neill – then running for national office for the first time himself – to deliver a speech that the Kennedy campaign had written. The speech showed up so late that Cab offered to switch places and speak first, then stayed to hear O’Neill. The speech “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge. I didn’t have time to edit it or make any changes…I was humiliated.” Lodge left halfway through the speech and told O’Neill’s wife, “You know, the Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he’s saying about me.”

When the election results came in, JFK had won by less than 71,000 votes out of over 2.3 million cast.

Suddenly out of a job, Eisenhower appointed Cab as the head of his transition team and then as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, securing Cab a spot in Eisenhower’s cabinet. While Ambassador to the U.N., Cab maintained a high profile. He worked behind (and in front of) the scenes during the Suez Canal crisis, and the revolt in Hungary in 1956. Lodge was Nikita Khruschev’s escort during his 1959 tour of the United States.

In March 1960, eight months before the presidential election, the U.S. government made a formal decision (in secret) to overthrow Castro. Preparations were underway for an invasion of Cuba at Castro’s favorite fishing spot – the Bay of Pigs. Castro had appealed to the United Nations for help, providing detailed evidence to the U.N. Security Council of pilots. Ambassador Lodge assured Castro and the Security Council “the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba.”

Eisenhower’s national security policy focused on building the American economy to support the Cold War, relying on nuclear weapons to deter communist aggression (supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ “Brinksmanship” policy of showing that you’re just wheels-off enough to take your nukes out for a spin in an effort to get the other side to back down), and carrying out secret/covert operations against governments who made eyes at the Soviet Union. Lodge would have been privy to all of this and, given his relationship with Eisenhower, tacitly approved.

Nixon chose Cab as his vice presidential candidate for a few reasons: His foreign policy experience in working under Eisenhower would be well-received, and that Nixon thought the Lodge name could check Kennedy’s popularity in New England. Cab made a Republican misstep, telling a Harlem crowd that a Nixon Presidency would name an African-American to its Cabinet. Plot twist: he walked it back. It probably lost Nixon the South. The Nixon/Lodge ticket lost the popular vote to the Kennedy/Johnson ticket by 113,000 votes out of 68 million cast. There were likely Shenanigans.
President Kennedy needed bipartisan support. As a liberal Northern Democrat, Kennedy had to face not only the Republicans but the Southern Democrats, who didn’t like anybody, and certainly didn’t support Kennedy’s progressive agenda which built on Eisenhower’s actions and the Warren Court of the mid-1950s.

Lodge’s promise that the United States had no aggressive purpose against Cuba, as the disaster of the Bay of Pigs “invasion” – three months after JFK’s inauguration – showed. And, hold on a second, JFK was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba and Castro? Reporter Jean Daniel was in Cuba with Fidel Castro when JFK was assassinated. Castro had told reporter Daniel, regarding Kennedy, that he (Castro) was not afraid of getting assassinated, and that assassination at the hands of the United States would only raise his own standing in Latin America. But Castro understood that Kennedy was in a unique position to make everything okay in the Western Hemisphere. As he told Jean Daniel on November 19, 1963, three days before Kennedy’s assassination:

Kennedy could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leaders who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with.

Well, that would have flown in the face of everything Lodge stood for, politically.  

A quick aside: JFK had resigned his Senate seat to run for president in 1960. His brother, Ted, wanted the Senate seat to match the accomplishments of his brothers (Robert was John’s Attorney General), but he wouldn’t be the required 30 years old until 1962. JFK asked Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo to name Ben Smith – a friend of the Kennedy family – as the interim senator to serve out JFK’s term, keeping the Senate seat open for Ted. He faced George Cabot Lodge, Cab’s son, in the 1962 election. Ted Kennedy beat George Cabot Lodge by just under 300,000 votes. It was the third time the Lodges and Kennedys had squared off in an election. Kennedys were up 2-1.

Kennedy asked Cab to become the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He accepted, and arrived in August 1963, ostensibly to corral Ngo Dinh Diem, who was living The Life thanks to American money, and squashing opposition. Notably, Diem had authorized raids on Buddhist pagodas where upwards of hundreds of Buddhists were killed by Diem’s forces, orchestrated by Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. Cable 243 authorized Cab to pressure Diem to remove Nhu. If he didn’t, the United States would look for other leadership in South Vietnam. Lodge interpreted it as an opportunity to send the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to remove Diem if he didn’t take his brother out. Diem was assassinated, along with his brother, on November 2, 1963, the day after Diem’s government was overthrown by the South Vietnamese military. Kennedy, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, “accepted the coup but did not order or contemplate the assassination of Diem.” Cable 243 is seen as a turning point in the Vietnam War, as the U.S. became more heavily involved in Vietnam in an effort to stabilize the country. Kennedy blamed himself for not handling Lodge more appropriately. Less than three weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

By now it’s generally accepted that JFK was planning on withdrawing troops from Vietnam. One thousand troops were slated to return to the United States by the end of 1963. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a memo on October 4, 1963 explaining that JFK had already approved recommendations for a full withdrawal of “special assistance units and personnel by the end of 1965.” This decision was decidedly not the stance of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, who ardently believed in the Domino Theory that if Vietnam fell to communism, other Southeast Asian countries would soon follow. Feel free to draw your own psychological conclusions that Cab was such a strident internationalist given the hardline isolationist stance taken by his grandfather, the man who raised him.

Roger Stone, who is problematic in a variety of ways, wrote a best-selling book called “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” in which he recalls a 1979 conversation with Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge – Cab’s brother:

I knew that JFK had planned to fire ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge upon his return from Texas on November 24, 1963. I also know that Lodge knew why he had been summoned to see the President. I couldn’t resist asking John Lodge about his brother.

“Did you ever ask your brother who really killed Kennedy?”

His lips spread into a tight grin. “Cabot said it was the Agency boys, some Mafiosi.” He looked me in the eye. “And Lyndon.”

“Did your brother know in advance?” I asked.

Lodge took a sip of his Manhattan. “He knew Kennedy wouldn’t be around to fire him. LBJ kept him at his post so he could serve his country.”

In James Douglass’ book “JFK and the Unspeakable,” Robert Kennedy is on record:

“The individual who forced out position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back – and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired – because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us…The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them…[Lodge] wouldn’t communicate….We were trying to figure out how to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.”

There’s an excerpt in Phillip F. Nelson’s book “LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination” referencing an article from the Honolulu Star Bulletin:

“In Hawaii on November 21, 1963…shortly after lunch Honolulu time, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge made a long distance call from the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…This distinguished diplomat had access to phones in privacy from his room or the military circuits at no cost…yet he was seen, according to the Star Bulletin, with a stack of quarters in his hand putting coin after coin into a pay phone…Lodge as the only person of the seven member policy-making body to stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…the others stayed in the military quarters.”

JFK wouldn’t hold that meeting with Lodge on November 24. LBJ would.

In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Republicans were assessing their chances of defeating LBJ in the 1964 election. Eisenhower called Cab to see if he would return from Vietnam to run for the Republican nomination. Cab declined.

Cab and Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, went on a tour of South Vietnam. McNamara recommended to LBJ to “furnish assistance and support to South Vietnam for as long as it takes to bring the insurgency under control.” The next day National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, on LBJ’s behalf, enacted McNamara’s recommendations in NSA Memorandum 288. The Vietnam War was escalating.

President Lyndon B. Johnson re-appointed Cab as the Ambassador to South Vietnam, a post he held from 1965-1967 – the years following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was LBJ’s excuse to escalate military involvement in Vietnam. In the July 29, 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Cab wrote a letter explaining that the U.S. was winning in Vietnam. Six months later the Tet Offensive began.

Two Boston political families: the Kennedys – who were of Boston society, and the Lodges – who were Boston society. Two political dynasties intersecting as they each fell and rose, respectively. Anti-immigrant (and, thus, anti-Catholic) Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who almost single-handedly kept the United States out of the League of Nations, a titan of American politics, kept the Lodge dynasty alive, besting a Kennedy in the process. The Kennedys seemingly derailed the Lodge political dynasty with the 1952 election, but was kept alive by Eisenhower and later by JFK himself. If JFK was undermining Lodge’s foreign policy goals, and embarrassing him in the process, of what could Lodge be capable?